


Super not heroic

by nocactus80



Category: X-Men (Movieverse)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-20
Updated: 2018-09-20
Packaged: 2019-07-14 19:15:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16046831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nocactus80/pseuds/nocactus80
Summary: Mike writes a quick blog of his slow conversion to super.





	Super not heroic

I’m not a writer, but my doc said I should write all this down, and Cassie thought I should put it online for other people read, maybe help somebody else cope. Names and places and details are changed as needed to protect my anonymity. 

My name is Mike. I was born in ’79, so I was 11 when we the first Gulf War happened, 22 when the Twin Towers went down. I’m not sure why I volunteered? My dad had got back from Vietnam 4 years before I was born, and didn’t have a lot of positive things to say about the Army. I’m not a touchy feely guy. It wasn’t patriotism or vengeance or anything. I grew up about an hour south of Kansas City Missouri, and I didn’t know anyone on the East Coast. It didn’t really seem like my fight…it just seemed like the right thing to do. I’d failed out of college and spent most of ’99 to 2001 driving a forklift for Hillstreet Cold Storage and playing Everquest. I sort of knew I was pissing my life away, I guess? 

I was an 88M in the Army, a truck driver. I could have done a lot of other jobs, my ASVAB was pretty good, but 88M was paying the highest bonus for the shortest AIT (training school), so thats what I chose. I never saw any combat, not that I remember anyway. You say “combat” and you think of guys hiding behind rocks, yelling “I need cover fire!” The truck I was driving hit an IED (a big ass improvised mine, if you’ve been living under a rock for the last 20 years). I woke up in Balad Air Base hospital. Robertson, the dude next to me, didn’t. 

The dynamics of high explosives are sort of black magic even to people who study them for a living. It’s not unusual at all for the force of an explosion to turn one guy into chunky salsa and just pop the eardrums of the guy next to him. I got a pretty bad concussion, a broken tibia (right where the top of my boot was) and a lot of superficial injury from shrapnel (both metal and bone chip) but I wasn’t hurt as bad as they thought at first, most of the blood was Robert’s. A shrink once asked me if I have survivor guilt about it. Sometimes I feel guilty for not feeling guilty? Other than that no. 

With 0.5% of the world population being “supers”, everybody’s read the stories: you have some trauma as a child, some incredibly passionate moment or some life threatening injury and somehow it “unlocks”. Maybe you are lucky and it unlocks as when you rush into a burning orphanage or some shit, maybe you are unlucky and it unlocks when when your boyfriend breaks up with at the homecoming dance, you kill the whole homecoming court in a blood rage, and spent the rest of your life quietly weeping in a cell in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, like that girl in Toronto did. 

Either way, it makes a great movie right? Nice simple three act formula, close curtains, roll credits.  
The thing is that’s not how it happened to me. I started physical therapy, and I got better at the normal speed people do. After physical therapy, I just kept getting better, and better. I could lift more, run faster, etc. Our convey got hit in 2003, so I didn’t have much more time left in the Army. I got some attaboys for my recovery and left after my 4 years were up. Moved back home. It was another couple years before I started to realize I was a super. 

I didn’t get any bigger, just stayed standard, fit military dude. Every couple weeks of working out, I’d get a little stronger, though. I maxed out the weight machines at my local Planet Fitness, and I started to get the stinkeye from people. Nobody likes a show off, and people really dislike a super who’s trying to pass himself off as a normal human being just so he can be alpha all the time. I get why supers have to be registered, especially after that shit in Toronto. But I inherited by dad’s distrust of the government…I think a lot of prior military people do. The Army already has a file on me, and I don’t think that FBI needs to have one too. (Well I didn’t. I suppose they should now.) 

So I started working out at night before I start my shift, doing a prisoner style workout a long the bike trail. Jog for a while, then go do as many vertical pushups as I can and go back to jogging. I keep getting stronger, but not bigger, not bigger in size. It turns out I’m getting heavier though. I don’t know if that happens to most supers, but it did happen to me. I’d put on 100 lbs in a year. I can’t go the VA anymore because if I do, they’re probably going to notice that I weigh 300 lbs, but have 34” waist. 

I don’t know why I didn’t quit working out? I guess after not really being good at anything or sticking with anything before it just seemed like a good idea? But I realized that it was time for a change when was doing burpies on the floor in my apartment and I put my hand through the floor. Buy one of those special fat dude bathroom scales: I weigh 450 lbs. And I can do squats holding dead tree now. One of these days some jogger is going to see me doing that, and then there’s going to be knock at the door and FBI super is going to be standing there with friendly smile and some paperwork for me to fill out.

It’s 2006 now, I’m positive I’m a super and I don’t want to get registered as one. I did some reading to find the worst place in the U.S.: like highest murder rate, worst crime, just the worst. Not because I wanted to be a superhero vigilante (I think those guys are stupid.) but just because I figured the place a guy could just quietly disappear the most easily would be the shittiest place. I could have gone to Pontiac or Flint Michigan, but East Saint Louis is just a couple hours to the West, and still on the top 10 of worst places in the U.S. to live

If you open up crime map of East Saint Louis there is this big red splotch shaped like a porkchop where the most murders happen. I bought a house there. Did you know that you can buy a house for $5000 in cash, or at least you could in 2006, before the subprime bubble burst. I’m not joking, the ad said “purchaser is responsible for removal of blood stains”. The realtor wouldn’t even come out the house with me. She met me at a coffee shop half an hour away, and agreed to meet me there again in an hour.

So now I'm veteran and a homeowner, fantastic right? I sort of don’t really have bills, what with no rent. I don’t really need a car anymore, I just ride a bicycle, or I should say a series of them. I keep breaking bikes because they don’t make 600 lb dudes who can peddle 20 mph all day. So I got an old 70’s dirtbike and made it into a mountain bike. I put some pics up on a forum online for metalworkers …well it turns out a lot of supers need random extra heavy duty stuff: Bikes for people who put out more power than a motorcycle, a toilet for dude that pisses at 2000 psi, (evolution has a real sense of humor about this whole super thing), running shoes made from wire rope and old steel belted radials for chick that runs 70 mph. So I start making a living selling this random stuff to anonymous people…probably supers. 

That’s how I meet Cassie. Cassie works for a charity that helps out anonymous supers. Whatever happened to me left me looking pretty much the same, like it does for lot of supers. But it doesn’t forever one. There’s people with super healing ability that found out halfway though being burned to death, people with super strength muscles and normal strength bones who spend half their lives in casts. There’s people the size of grizzly bears, people with super sensitive smelling with a muzzle that takes up most of their face like an anteater. It’s horribly disfiguring for some people is what I’m saying. Cassie saw the stuff I was making online, and was buying it for the people she helps out. She goes to people’s homes and takes measurements for things like crutches, beds, toilet. 

We talk a lot online, and it turns out she lives in Saint Louis well. We agree to have coffee. She cute, at least to me: big boobs, big butt, big smile. Honestly, probably big waist but it looks small because her boobs and butt are so big. Her hair is usually in what she calls “a sensible ponytail”. We start dating. The sex is pretty great. I bring that up because if you are a super and you are reading this, I just want you to know that it’s possible. My weight peaked out at 1600 lbs. I’m still the same size as a normal guy, but I weigh as much as a horse, and I’m strong enough that I do most of my metal work these days with my bare hands, the way potters work clay. I when I hit 450 lbs back in Kansas City, I thought I’d never be able to be with a woman, because what if I wasn’t gentle enough? Normal guys can leave bruises if they get too excited. At this point I can tear someone in half like breaking a Twix. So, I just want people to know if you have a partner who’s willing to experiment and you take the time to talk through it, you still can have a normal sexual relationship. Pretty sure that will all make Cassie blush as she’s editing this. 

Anyway, so Cassie doesn’t normally stay at my place. Partly because my mattress is a giant bag of find sand (you ever tried to get comfortable on a normal mattress when you weigh 10x more than the average person?) partly because the neighborhood is shit. Now, I know the neighbor hood is shit, but it doesn’t effect me…I’m IEDproof horseman. There’s a crackhouse about three doors down from me. Never been a problem. 

From what I read online, I’m in the top 10% of strength for human looking supers. It’s hard to figure out how much I can lift because I don’t want to go one of those government centers to be tested, but I know I can benchpress a ’76 Caddy pretty easily (about 5,000 lbs, but I’m only lifting the front end), because I do when I’m changing the oil for a drug dealer acquaintance of mine. Apparently one the idiots three doors down sees this and tells his boss that there is a super in the neighborhood. 

Cassie comes over and we’re making love when someone kicks in the front door. Put pants on, open bedroom door, four gang bangers in my living room looking at my welder. (I weld in my living room. What the fuck else am I supposed to do there? I flatten normal furniture. Besides, the living room is right over the 240V line for the house and the easiest place to keep my welder.) 

I’m standing there wearing nothing but jeans, boner slowly deflating. I’m trying to deescalate the situation because if anything happens here, I’m going to be outed as a super.

Blah blah blah gangster posturing, guns waving around, I need to pay the protection money, or I can do some work for them. 

“Guys, this is really bad idea, OK. I’m just disabled veteran who likes to work out a lot, OK? I don’t know what you’ve heard, but I’m not a super.” 

I’m getting my body between them and bedroom door, where I know Cassie is getting dressed when one of them says something to the effect of…

“It would be a shame if something happens to that big booty white girl when you aren’t around, so you should listen to us.”

They’re bunching around me trying to get to the bedroom now, way too close…I guess I have to do this now?

I started out with a punch at the nearest one’s face, but I realized halfway through, I’m swinging way, way too hard, so I sort of opened by hand. I figure I’m going to slap him hard enough to knock him down, maybe into the next guy. That was with my right hand. As I feel his body start to move I swing my left hand over in a haymaker right the other guys gut. It doesn’t even feel like flesh? More like punching water in the pool. He’s headed the opposite direction now. The other two guys haven’t blinked yet.

Only one of the two of them that’s left has a gun (the front two both did). My momentum has sort of turned my body right, so I kick gunless in the knee. My foot lands high, in the middle of his thigh and that’s when I start realize things are going a little…weirdly. His leg sort of raps around my foot, and kinda sticks to it as I’m trying to turn to the other guy. He still hasn’t blinked. I’m slowing down but not slow enough yet. I’m standing almost beside him and shoulder check him.

It’s like time and gravity are turned down to one. He sort of jellos into me as I shoulder check him and slowly bounces off and upward.

You’re going to have to believe me. Yes I’d trained for 10 years. Yes I’m a super and I know that. But I’d never done anything as a super with adrenaline ok? I was trying to hurt them, but I wasn’t trying to do what I did. I didn’t know. 

I spun around and the first guys body is still flying sideways. His head though? It’s flying sideways a lot faster, the blood drops between it and his body still hanging in the air. Second guy’s spine is poking all wrong out of his back, and the dent in his flesh is still there. Third guys leg is bent at 90 deg angle, which would be fine if it was at the knee, but it’s not…it’s half way up his leg. Fourth guy is still flying.

It seems like it all takes forever to stop, for the noises to come back in, for reality to go normal speed again. Sound of head hitting wall. Sound of bodies hitting walls and floors. Sound of man with leg inhaling to scream. Sound of gunshots, not aimed at Cassie thankfully. It’s just when your spine get’s punched out your back from the front, you spasm and if you are holding a loaded gun it goes off. It also turns out that when you get hit in the guts hard enough to break your spin, that your lungs crush, and you don’t scream…you just sort of let a wet, wheezy wheezy, frothing noise.


End file.
